Demand Media’s Parking Revenue/Domain Sales Down 33% In 2013 & They Are Confused On gTLD Numbers

In the earnings call yesterday Demand Media, Inc. (DMD) had some interesting details about the financials they released for the 4th quarter of 2013 and for the full year 2013 and some interesting statements which demonstrate they are somewhat confused by the new gTLD numbers.

So in 2013 Demand is saying their revenue from parking and domain sales combined, was down 33% in 2013 Vs. 2012.

As for the new gTLD numbers, well the statements made in the earnings call are inconsistent.

“More than 90 new gTLDs have been launched into the sunrise and/or general availability phases and more than 60 of those are leveraging Rightside backend registry platform, to-date, more than 150,000 domains have been registered on our platform.”

OK we agree with the 150K number which are all Donuts extensions.

Now here is where the trouble starts:

“”The sale number that we mentioned was 150,000 domains. Those were sold in sunrise essentially and so there’s a little bit in [GA], but I think it’s early enough to where there isn’t enough general availability, information to be able to draw, I think, even early trend lines with.””

Hum

Based on a search of the zone files and reported by many blogs trademark holders didn’t widely apply for domains and there are still only 25K registrations in the Trademark Clearing House which at best would represent less than 20% of all registrations.

No Bueno.

Next statement:

“”I would say, we’re pretty pleased with the early results just given that, we — one of the questions was, what do we think the consumer demand is going to be in, within really a couple of weeks of being offered. We’re seeing hundreds of thousands of domains being registered. So we think that’s a pretty positive sign for the industry in general.””

Well the number is 150,000 not hundreds of thousands and if they came mostly in Sunrise then they are not consumers registrations and if they are consumer registrations they are not Sunrise (brand) registrations.

Beyond that we know that the domainer community has a lot of skin in the game.

The words domainer or domain investor were not uttered during the call.

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.